INFORMATION TO USERS

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter free, while others may be from any type of computer printer.

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material bad to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book.

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order.

A Beil & Howell information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313'761-4700 800 521-0600 Order Number 9B16947

A comparative study of reductionist tendencies in the arts

Cassidy, Neil Patrick, D.M.A.

The Ohio State University, 1994

Copyright ©1994 by Cassidy, Neil Patrick. All rights reserved.

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REDUCTIONIST TENDENCIES IN THE ARTS

DOCUMENT

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Neil P. Cassidy, B.M.

*****

The Ohio State University 1 994

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Thomas Wells Richard Blatti Marc Ainger Adviser School of Music Copyright by Neil P. Cassidy 1994 VITA

April 2f 1957 ...... Bom Jersey City, New Jersey

1989...... Bachelor of Music, The University of Texas at San Antonio

MAJOR FIELD OF STUDY Music Composition TABLE OF CONTENTS

VITA ...... ii

INTRODUCTION...... 1

PAINTING...... 4 SCULPTURE...... 7 ARCHITECTURE...... 10 MUSIC ...... 12 DANCE...... 20 CONCLUSION...... 23 EPILOGUE...... 24 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 28 INTRODUCTION

Not long ago I started researching Minimalism with the hope that it might support the idea of postmodernism as an outgrowth of, rather than a rebellion against, modernism. My idea was basically this. As today's 'popular* Minimalism1 can be seen as a generally postmodern notion, the overtly reductionist tendencies that I saw as at the roots of these practices seemed to me to be a peculiarly modernist project. In exploring the connection between today's mainstream Minimalism and the earlier, highly reductionist work, the postmodern may then be seen as a continuation, in this sense, of modernism, rather than as a separate, breakaway period coming after modernism. What interested me in Minimalism was the reductionist attitude toward materials and its clarity of form. I am more interested here in these two features as general stylistic traits rather than in any sort of chronological framework for an historic movement. With this in mind the works considered come from a

1 'Popular' Minimalism as mentioned here refers to the repetitive, pulse oriented music of composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, et al. Although it was in the paintings of the early 1960's, and slightly later in sculpture, that the term "Minimalism" first found currency, it was in selected music circles that the term held on during the 1970’s until finding a more widespread usage in the 1980's. 1 much broader span of time than is generally associated with Minimalism in the arts. As a point of departure individual artists and selected works within a particular discipline are looked at through the writing of Clement Greenberg. Greenberg was an influential critic whose writings exerted great influence on both artists and critics alike. Greenberg, dealing with the essence of 'pure' painting became, for me, a guide for exploring the extreme reductionist attitude that according to Greenberg, characterizes the art of the late modern era. In particular the following quotation:

It follows that a modernist work of art must try, in principle, to avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given in the most essentially construed nature of its medium. This means, among other things, renouncing illusion and explicitness. The arts are to achieve concreteness, "purity'', by acting solely in terms of their separate and irreducible selves.2

I believe that high modern concerns as voiced by Greenberg show themselves in much of what I came to think of as an 'historic' Minimalism. For me historic minimalism became characterized by this search for the essentials of a discipline, a move toward self- definition through a highlighting of the medium. If there is any singular driving force behind my approaches and conclusions in the following paper it is this. In highlighting the medium through the avoidance of content and referentiality on the part of the artist, the

2 Clement Greenberg, "The New Sculpture", An and Culture: Critical Essays. Beacon Press, Boston, 1961. p. 139. 3 artwork became more 'objective' in its nature, allowing, according to Greenberg, for each art "to achieve concreteness." I began to look at certain practices in painting, architecture, sculpture, dance and music and tried to see how I could apply Greenberg. In painting and sculpture, which was what Greenberg was actually talking about, the work that relates was easier to locate and discuss in his terms. In the other disciplines, however, there is always a certain amount of apples and oranges comparison that takes place. Perhaps this type of comparison may be thought by some to be a shortcoming of this essay. With this in mind let me say that I am not holding that say, the International style of architecture of the 20's and 30’s relates exactly to Greenberg or minimal sculpture or the early music of LaMonte Young but, rather, that ideas of abstraction, reduction and objectivism surface in all the disciplines at one time or another and lend themselves to discussion in this context. For myself, this is the merit of the paper. PAINTING

Greenberg says that pure painting aspires to be about nothing other than itself. In its pure form it would be would paint and flatness, devoid of outward expression, defining itself through the use of the medium's essential materials. Accompanying the Greenbergian search for purity is the idea that expression in a work is not an essential aspect of an artwork. In this light referentiality, allegory, metaphor and content are seen as ’extra' attributes of a work, detracting from their purity. The use of the term 'purity' may at first seem vague and of little use. Allan Kaprow reminds us that

It is sometimes easier to see what a certain term means by comparing it to a related term - in this case, a contrary. When we use the wordpure , we have in mind physical and structural attributes - like clear; uncontaminated by admixture of foreign substances; unweakened by vitiiating material; formal (rational, nonempirical). We also associate pure with moral qualities such as chastity, cleanliness, refinement, virtue, holiness and spirituality. Finally, a metaphysical connotation is involved, for purity suggests something beyond innocence or the clergy, namely that what is abstract, essential, authentic, true, absolute, perfect, utter, sheer.3

3 Allan Kaprow. ■Impurity", Essavs on the The Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff KellcyUnivcrsity of California Press, Berkeley 1993. p. 27-28. 4 5 Two things should be kept in mind here. The first is that it will be difficult to fully locateany work as being 'pure'. To even approach a work with such a labeling is to contaminate it, a sort of Heisenberg principle as applied to artwork. Secondly, and our only hope, is to locate works along a continuum of impurity to purity. This is where Kaprow’s suggestion of comparing purity to its contrary notion of impurity is helpful, that is to say a work is more or less pure than another work. There were many painters of the late 1940's/1950's/early 1960’s that produced work exhibiting the Greenbergian purity of means and non-referentiality. The monochrome canvases of Reinhardt, Rauschenberg, Stella, Newman, Noland, Klein and Olitski are notable examples of work that, on the surface at least, met with Greenberg’s criteria. Using paint and surface only they define themselves without reference to the world outside themselves. The project of such paintings is dramatically enforced in one of Frank Stella’s most famous statements:

I always have arguments with people who want to retain the "old values" in painting- the "humanistic" values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint and the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen is there . . . If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you cansee the whole idea 6 without any confusion . . . What you see is what you see*4 Reductionist efforts in painting however, did not begin in mid­ century America. Earlier reductionist efforts in painting can be found in Malevich's White on White (1919) and Rodchenko's Black on Black (1920). These are monochromes predating the paintings that Greenberg championed by 30 or so years. They deserve mention as early reductionist efforts but with qualification. To the eye the earlier canvases look the same, and in fact 'are' the same, as the later ones. A difference however, lies in artistic approach, in the professed ideology of their respective movements. The ideologies of the groups producing earlier reductionist work (Malevich and the Suprematists as they strove to express their contemporary culture, De Stijl as they expressed the world in simple color and geometry, the Constructivists and their Leninist mission) do not permit the works to meet the non-referentiality condition of Greenberg’s purity.

4Frank Stella, Working Space. Cambridge, MA, 1986, as quoted in Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Centurv: 1945 to the Present. Prcntice-Hall, New Jersey, 1991. p. 202. SCULPTURE

In sculpture the minimalist style of the 1960's can be seen as an outgrowth of painting.5 The earliest primary structures6 appear to be paintings that have, in a sense, come ’off the wall'. These monochrome cubes seem to be paintings without the surface of paintings, i.e. without their flatness. A look at the I950's/early 1960’s paintings of Frank Stella in their surface protrusions and multiplanes show a consistent refusal of flatness.7 In Greenberg's eyes this would fall short of purity in its renunciation of flatness, which was for Greenberg an essential aspect of a painting’s nature. Another tendency toward reduction in sculpture however, lies not in painting influences on sculpture but, rather the influence of the found object art of Duchamp and those who came after him. Although the found object by its very nature is referential, inherent in Duchamp is a basic reductive questioning regarding the nature of the art object.

5 As Robert Morris maintains in his "Notes on Sculpture", minimalist sculpture was not struggling with form and illusion as was painting and, as such, does not deserve to be seen as dcsccndent from minimalist painting. Morris feels strongly that the issues raised in sculpture were articulated by sculpture itself. 6 'Primary Structures' was the title of an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1966. 7 For the idea of Stella's paintings coming "off the wall" I am indebted to Dr. Stephen Melville, as delivered in a class lecture for the class Art Since 1945. Spring, 1991. 7 8 The use of found materials in the work of, among others, Robert Morris, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, is as much concerned with an elimination of illusion as it with creating an artistic context for objects not normally seen as such. The more refined constructions of the minimalist sculptors (i.e. those objects 'made' rather than found) and the discourse provided by many artists, particularly Judd and Morris, epitomize the formalism of Greenberg. Morris, for instance, asserts

the work must be autonomous in the sense of being a self-contained unit for the formation of the gestalt, the indivisible and undissolvable whole, the major aesthetic terms are not in but dependent upon this autonomous object and exist as unified variables that find their specific definition in the particular space and light and physical viewpoint of the spectator.8

Two modernist historical precedents for reductionist sculpture can be found in the Russian Constructivists and in the abstract organic sculptures of Brancusi. As in the monochrome canvases of the early twentieth century both of these precedents carry anadded philosophical, metaphorical or content related project that Greenberg would say was not crucial to the works essence. The unity and purity of the Constructivists, with Malevich as one of their chief proponents, took its inspiration from and interesting mix of Russian mysticism and, later, Bolshevik doctrine. Also a part of Constructivist

8 Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture", appearing in Minimal Art: A Critical A nthology. Gregory Battcock, Ed., E.P. Dutton Company, New York, 1968, p. 234, The Morris article originally appeared in 2 parts. Part I Artforum, in February, 1966, and Pan II inArtforum in October, 1966. 9 ideology was the invention of abstract forms related to science and technology. The abstract sculptures of Brancusi, on the other hand, take from nature as their inspiration and, as such, approach the 'im pure.' The influence of the the developments in Constructivism were long lasting. As the Constructivist project became intertwined with the post-revolution political agenda, many artists left Russia.The Realist Manifesto (1920) gave a dissenting opinion regarding the manner of Constructivism’s development along political lines.

They argued for a Constructivist art concerned with nothing but space and time, made evident in 'real' industrial materials. . . . It was this 'intellectualist' instead of 'utilitarian' brand of Utopian Constructivism, blended with De Stijl, that formed the core ideology of the Bauhaus School in Germany until the advent of the Nazis in 1933. Thereafter, Constructivism or Bauhaus space/time aesthetics would survive vigorously, well beyond 1945, in a great variety of geometric, light, and kinetic works, but also monumentalized and simplified, in Minimalism.9

9 Wheeler, p.21. ARCHITECTURE

In architecture the 'purity* involved in the philosophy of the International Style struck me as somewhat Greenbergian. Although the chronology predates Greenberg, the writings of Adolf Loos (1870-1933) show the spirit that fed the buildings and writings of the next generation of architects, most notably Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. In his 1908 essay Ornament and Crime Loos states "The evolution of a culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects."10

The work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) rings Greenbergian in its 'less is more* assertion. According to Robert Hughes, Mies

. . . always retained an obsessive interest in formal absolutes. . Mies' output was not large, but his buildings exerted an influence out of all proportion to their number because they were, at root, about the same thing: the formal absolutes approached by the rectilinear use of industrial materials.11

In general the International Style of architecture also had a political and social agenda in its ideology that Greenberg would say

10 Loos, as quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1991, p. 168. 11 ibid., p. 180. 1 0 11 contaminated its purity. As this was true enough of some of Mies' colleagues, it seems not as much a factor in his own work. Hughes claims

In his desire for a universal grammar of architecture, Mies van der Rohe was apt to sweep aside the questions of meaning within the buildings themselves; they interfered with the perfect Zero that he struggled to approach. . . . He would take infinite pains working out how to turn a corner with I-beams and cladding, and simply ignore the social matrix in which the building was embedded. The prism-with-variations could go anywhere and serve any purpose. It was free of ideology.12

How successful Mies was at removing himself from any political ideology is not as much my concern here as is the comparison that stems basically from the attempt by architecture at defining itself through its materials. As the referentiality and Mlegorical na’nre a11 architecture is unavoidable (i.e. a buildingis a building and has intended function), the application of Greenberg can perhaps be appreciated in simplified, glossy look of the buildings themselves. These are, for the most part, structures of extreme simplicity, cubelike and streamlined in their line and surface. In their appearance they seem distantly related to the boxes and cubes of 1960’s minimal sculpture. From this comparison rises the following observation: the buildings tend toward primary structure sculpture as much minimal sculpture tends toward a basic concern with architectural space.

12 ibid.. p. 184. MUSIC

In music the notion of Greenbergian purity can begin with a discussion of Cage and his work, particularly his 1957 address to the Music Teachers National Association

Or, . . . one may give up the desiTe to control sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.13

Cage, of course, figures prominently in the discussion of postmodernism. To interpret him here as Greenbergian modernist may seem a stretch. I wish this comparison to be made however, only in regard to the non-referentiality aspect of Greenberg's statement. With this in mind it is possible to see such works as 4'33" as a reductionist, pure approach to a discipline defining itself through its medium, Cage's sounds without reference, stripping music of its programmaticism or allegory. The sound simply refers to itself. With regard to objectivism in music, if we separate Greenberg’s statement on artistic ’purity' into two distinct criteria, one being a eductive approach to means and, the other being the non- referentiality of the work, and focus only on the non-referentiality,

13John Cage, "Experimental Music", in Silence. Weslayen University Press, Connecticut, 1973. p. 10 1 2 1 3 we can at once find ourselves in a discussion of absolutism versus programmatic ism or of content and idea versus autonomy. The idea of objectivity in music is not exactly the same as the 'purity' that I am seeking to compare here but it is related. In his discussion of musical objectivity14 Edward Lippman claims that theories of objectivity and autonomy in music challenged ideas of content and feeling, striving to have music understood in its own terms. Lippman cites Schenker as "perhaps the most influential of all writers presenting a theory of intrinsic law in music."15 Schenker’s intrinsic law in music rejects all types of meaning in music. The following* quote by Schenker emphasizes this. With the absolute character of the life of a tone, as it is confirmed for the first time precisely by counterpoint, there is also given at the same time the emancipation of the life of the tone from every external purpose, whether it be the word, the stage, or, in general, the anecdotal of any kind of p ro g ra m .16 To Lippman the search for absolute musical laws, and the theories of Schenker can certainly be included here, are indicative of a growing trend toward objectivity in music. Lippman offers possible explanations for such a trend; first, a growing response to Expressionism as a descendent of Romanticism and neo- Romanticism, and, second a reaction to experimentation in general.

14 Edward Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1992. p.393-436. 15 ibid.. p.393. 16 Quoted in Lippman from Schenker’s Kontrapunkt (1910) which is included in Schenker's Neue musikalische Theoien und Phantasien. 3. vol., Vienna, 1906-36. 1 4 Although the entirety of Romantic musical aesthetic is not the scope of this essay, the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer regarding music, particularly those involving the relationship of the composer to music, are typical of what Lippman sees musical objectivity as a reaction to. In his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.17 first published in 1819, Schopenhauer places music above all the other arts. For Schopenhauer the world can only be posited in relation to something else, and that something else is his/one's consciousness. Simply put is the Will that gives consciousness its structure. Other arts, according to Schopenhauer, are copies/objectifications of the Will. Music is the Will itself. From this point of view music is given the same status as ideas, as opposed to the status of phenomena as in the other arts. Although he is quite clear that music "never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself of all phenomena, the Will itself,"18 included is his writings is the idea that music is, in a sense, the language of the Will, and as such a language deals with expression of some sort, a notion cherished during his century. In the reaction against Expressionism and the reaction against experimentation Lippman could have easily been explaining the rise of neo-Classicism, as indeed much discourse on objectivity came from within that movement. Lippman sees the professed objectivity in the music and writings of Stravinsky and Hindemith as directly

17 Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellunp. in the translation The World as Will and Idea, by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp. London, 6th edition, 1907-09. 18 ibid. p.338. 1 5 traceable to notions of natural musical law as expressed in Schenker, For me, the connection is sustainable but with further explanation. Neo-classicism is not objective in the sense that the paintings and sculpture discussed earlier approached objectivity. The music Neo-classic music of Stravinsky and Hindemith is not abstract or totally incapable of relating to anything outside of itself, as in the Greenbergian sense. In fact, inherent in the term Neo-classic is that there is something 'classic' to which it is being related. What is objective about the work is the way the pieces do not really stand definable or explainable in relation to their culture. They are not nearly as recognizable as expressions of the culture that produced them as works from the previous century. But, if the Neo-classic music of the 1920's and 1930's does not approach musical 'purity', then at least it can be seen as a development along the way toward such undertakings. Consider how the following quote by Cage rings with much of the same thought as the above quote by Schenker and brings him into the time line of musical objectivity:

A sound does not view itself as a thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has no time for any consideration- it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itse lf.19

19 ibid., p. 14. 1 6 The work of LaMonte Young is seminal in the development of minimal music. Although influenced by Cage there are notable differences in their work and what eventually became the popular Minimalism of the 1970's flourished almost entirely away from Cuge and his work. While the aesthetic of Cage allowed for many events to be occurring at once* Young chose to focus more on a single phenomena or, at the very least, simplified events. While both seem to be concerned with developing new ways of hearing, Cage often starts from this multiplicity and Young from a greatly reduced, often singular means. Sayre points out a similarity between Young's reductionism and Cage’s silences as described by Cage in the following:

LaMonte Young is doing something quite different from what I am doing, and it strikes me as being very important. Through the few pieces of his I've heard, I’ve had, actually, utterly different experiences of listening than I’ve had with any other music. He is able through the repetition of a single sound or through the continued performance of a single sound for a period like twenty minutes, to bring it about that after, say, five minutes, I discover that what I have all along been thinking was the same thing is not the same thing after all, but full of variety.20 To put it another way, Young and Cage were both involved in another way of hearing. Cage professed and demonstrated that silence was full of sounds to be heard, whereas Young set out

20 Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989. p. 110. Originally appearing in "An Interview with Roger Reynolds". 1 7 exploring the seemingly endless variety to be found in events previously thought to be monotonous and repetitive. In his early work the basic elements of music, sounds and silence, are thrust into the foreground. Young's Composition 1960 #7 which consists of a B and an F# to "be held for along time”. In his Trio (1957) the opening section of three notes sound barely audible for over 5 minutes. When the third notes dies away the players observe 25 seconds of rest. Edward Strickland makes an interesting case for Young's Trio as a minimal serial work. This is not as surprising as it sounds as it was within the hegemony of serialism that Young and his minimal-to-be colleagues were educated and received their early training.21 Although both pieces predate the later repetitive minimalism (introduced by Terry Reilly) they show an economy of means that emphasizes the spirit of reduction and the clarity of form. In these two important ways Young set the stage for further developments in the popular minimalism (of Glass, Reich, Adams et al.,) with his works serving as a jumping off point for the later process oriented music. In relating Greenberg to the historical Minimalism of Young's early works we may have best found an analogous situation to the painting and sculpture discussed earlier. Young has indeed limited his materials. They are so limited in some cases as to approach definition of the medium through the highlighting of music’s most

21 Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1993. p. 119-120. 1 8 basic components - sound and silence. Greenberg would call this a striving for a discipline's purity. Where they fall short though, is where the monochrome canvases of the early twentieth century fall short, that the pieces seem to carry a degree of programmaticism, of extra musicality. The program here is a social, or more specifically, a political one. Although Young's historical Minimalism may have been concerned somewhat with self definition, an overriding feeling of rebellion against the musical establishment and, perhaps, society in general can be detected. Unlike the objectivity of the Neo-classicist discussed above, these are works that bear direct and discussable relation to the culture that produced them. * A direct comparison of the later 'popular' Minimalists to the type of 1950's painting that Greenberg championed is made by Tom Johnson in 1972. He writes:

The form of the pieces is always flat. They are not interested in building to climaxes, or in manipulating tension and relaxation, or in working with large contrasts of any kind. They keep their music flat, never allowing it to rise above or fall below a certain plane. In a way this flatness is related to the idea of ‘all over' painting. In both cases, there is an attempt to make all areas of the form equal in importance.22

It is possible to relate the objectivist/reductionist tendency in music to the music of the early tape studios, particularly the French

22 Tom Johnson, "La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Reilly, Philip Glass", in The Voice of New Music: New vork Citv 1972-1982. Het Apollohuis, Netherlands, 1989. p. 44. .Compare Johnson’s description to Rainer's approach of flattening out of time to highlight the medium as discussed below. 1 9 National Radio studio in Paris under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. As I see it, in Schaeffer's musique concrete, sounds as they occur in the world were recorded for potential music material. As Schaeffer soon found out, sounds often have a distinct recognizability. One of the ways of avoiding a sounds connotation, Schaeffer discovered, was to shorten a sound by chopping off its beginning or its end, thus often eliminating the telltale nature of the sound’s initial attack and final decay. Working with sound in this way is objectivist in that content is weakened by eliminating the potential signature attack of a sound, and reductionist in that implies a rethinking of the nature of the art object. Schaeffer's work shares the Duchampian notion that any worldly object, in this case a sound as it exists in nature, has potential artistic status. DANCE

Merce Cunningham's comments about the movement referring to nothing but itself are remarkably similar to Cage's remarks about "sounds being themselves." This does not come as a surprise in light of the close collaboration of Cage and Cunningham. For me though, it has always been easier to locate Cunningham's work more fully within modernism. Cunningham’s work is in many ways tied to the technique and practice of an earlier modernism. Cage, even in his 'modernist' leanings was always more involved with newer techniques in music. The work of Anna Halprin, in its approach to technique and open attitude as to what kinds of movement may be considered 'artistic', may be thought of as minimal. The metaphysical program of her work however, seems less of a 'pure' approach. Work in dance that I also see as relevant comes from the generation of choreographers after Cunningham most notably Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and Trisha Brown. As students of Halprin each explored a 'purer", more self reflexive reductionist approach. In the early 1960's work of each of these choreographers the use of everyday movement and atypical dance situations may be read, through Greenberg, as the discipline in search of self definition. Through reduction they are exploring the basic materials of their 20 2 1 discipline -in this case movement and stasis occurring unavoidably in space. Forti's 1960 Dance Reports (two of which were "an onion sprouting in a jar and boys playing in the snow”23) overtly problematicize the question of self definition as does the Huddle (1961), a work in comparison less radical. Other work discussable in Greenbergian terms are those works that Banes’ refers to as "breakaway" postmodern works.24 Perhaps the "spirit of permissiveness and rebellion" that Banes' holds as prevalent in these works is not in the spirit of Greenberg, but the highlighting of the medium over content merits its inclusion here. Some dance work of Banes' "analytic" phase should also be considered as they show

a recognizable style . . . one that was reductive, factual, objective, and down-to-earth. Expressive elements such as music, special lighting, costumes, props, etc., were stripped away from d an cin g .25

Another prominent means of reduction in dance is the avoidance of the traditional preparation, execution and release phrasing of dance. Yvonne Rainer's Trio A makes explicit use of this approach. The avoidance of traditional phrasing flattens out time and elevates the objective, non-referential nature of the work.

23 Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. 1993. p. 11. 24 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers. Weslayen University Press. 1987. p. xv-xx. 25 ibid., p. xx. 22 Rainer enforces this herself in saying "A movement is a complete and self-contained event; elaboration in the sense of varying some aspect of it can only blur its distinctness."26 Of Trio A Banes says "The

beauty cf Trio .A lie'' not in ideas of grace, elegance, dramatic expression, or even of nature, but in the material truth of its coexistent presence and distance.”27 Although I am not quite sure that these choreographers can be relocated by me into high modernism, I will go as far as to say that, the basic Greenbergian notions of defining the discipline through a reductionist highlighting of the medium allows them to be considered modernist in at least these two respects.

26 Yvonne Rainer, "A Quasi Survey of Some ’Minimalist' Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trig ,A". appearing in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Battcock, Ed., E.P. Dutton Company, New York, 1968, p. 271. 27 Banes, p. 51. CONCLUSION

The actual pieces in any discipline that embrace the total nonreferentiality of Greenbergian formalism are few and confined to a small chronology within each discipline. While it seems that a work cannot really claim to bethe most pure in its discipline, it seems that works can, in Greenbergian terms, be thought of as more or less pure in relation to one another. As this makes it extremely problematic to locate the purest of works, in my mind it makes it equally problematic in locating a clear break between modernism and postmodernism. Even if a clear dividing line can be conceived of, aspects of postmodernism, in this case as it relates to minimalism in the arts, can be seen as having its origin in the highly reductive tendencies of modernism. Again, my contention is that a reductionist tendency is at the core of modernist aesthetic. I am relying on Greenberg to support this notion. Through a brief examination of works in different disciplines from 1920-1970, I have tried to show this reductionist tendency to be the originating impulse in modernism’s 'historical minimalism' and, later, in what evolved into postmodernism's 'popular* minimalism.

2 3 EPILOGUE

In closing I would like to introduce an important revelation that this work has led me to and, one that needs to be taken up as a study in its own. The striving for purity through economy of means in the arts has been briefly described above. I maintain that through a reductipnist approach to the medium a purity arises in the object. This purity aspires to a non-subjective state with reference only to itself. During most of this research I been trying to come up with some sort of Greenbergian reading of mainstream 20th century art music. A vast amount of music was unrelatable to Greenberg's ideas. I wondered how to locate Stravinsky and Schoenberg within the modernist discourse. Although Stravinsky was discussed in this essay, it was mostly in background terms, as a way of setting up later ideas. The work was, in a sense objective, but hardly abstract and never reductionist. Although in Schoenberg the music was, in a sense, abstract, the reductionist approach was absent. Webern, of course can be seen as reductionist and abstract, but the music is too complex to see as minimal. Where did they fit into the purity quest of modernism?

2 4 2 5 Several things gradually became clearer to me. First, both total serialism and reductionism both strive for an abstraction from context that will free the work of any possible outside reference. The same is also true of Cage's chance procedures. Serialism and chance attain abstraction through complexity as reduction does it by a stripping away approach. Total serialists strip away subjectivism as does Cage in his procedures. 1 began to look at Cage and the total serialists as very similar in their projects. Both sought abstraction through complexity; Cage through a multitude of possible events (i.e. ’life’) and the serialists throughV an extremely formalized system. The step that the total serialists took that was the ultimate toward abstraction was a treatment of durational units in the series. The effect was to abolish goal directed linear time in a musical work. Cage accomplished the same end by using the I Ching to remove the subjectivity of the composer. The effect of this was huge. Observing music before total serialism and Cage's indeterminacy George Rochberg states

At the root of musical time-its creation and regulation- are two unmistakable conditions which determine its essentially goal-oriented nature; directionality, which is produced by the relationships between pulsations and periodicities which move in only one way- toward the goal of structurally organic completion of the rhythmic forces and energies released in music; andcausality , which may be seen not only in the ways in which pitch elements affect each other, . . . but also in the tendency of metric/rhythmic forces to accumulate 2 6 and drive to climatic points in phrases, sections and movements, . . .28

In abolishing the goal direction in music the serialists and Cage, each in their own way, place their music in a purer, more objectivist state, one free of the narrative of goal directed linear time. To further apply Greenberg, the sounds are "renouncing illusion . . . to achieve concreteness, 'purity', by acting solely in terms of their separate and irreducible selves."29 Rochberg again:

Under the influence of Webern's most radical tendencies- those which tended to suspend shape and periodicity- the final steps were taken. In the music of the generation "after Webern" a rational serialization of pitch and rhythm, in other words space and time, completed the destruction of shape and periodicity, simultaneously altering the character of the music itself. Serial music thus arrived at nondirection in terms of both an integral structural order and audibility.30

Finally, if purity/nonreferentiality/self-definition can also be approached in music through complexity, then it would follow that in the disciplines discussed above purity/nonreferentiality/self- definition may be arrived at through similar tendencies toward complexity. This sounds very similar to a claim Rainer makes in her "A Quasi Survey

28 George Rochberg, "The Structure of Time in Music", in The Aesthetics of Survival. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1984.p. 142. 29 Greenberg, p. 139. 30 Rochberg, 'The Concept of Musical Time and Space" in The Aesthetics of S u rv iv al, p. 113. 2 7

Dance is hard to see. It must either be made less fancy, or the fact of that intrinsic difficulty must be emphasized to the point that it becomes impossible to see.31

31 Rainer, in Battcock p. 271. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers. Connecticut: Weslayen University Press. 1987.

Greenberg, Clement . "The New Sculpture", Art and Culture: Critical Essavs. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

Hughes, Robert . The Shock of the New. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. * John Cage, "Experimental Music", in Silence. Connecticut: Weslayen University Press, 1973.

Johnson, Tom. "La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Reilly, Philip Glass", in The Voice of New Music: New York Citv 1972-1982, Netherlands: Het Apollohuis, 1989.

Kaprow, Allan. Essavs on the The Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Lippman, Edward. A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Rainer, Yvonne. "A Quasi Survey of Some 'Minimalist' Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trip A”, appearing in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Battcock, Ed., New York: E.P. Dutton Company, 1968.

Rochberg, George. The Aesthetics of Survival. "The Concept of Musical Time and Space," "The Structure of Time in Music," Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

2 8 2 9 Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant- Garde Since 1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. in the translation The World as Will and Idea, by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp. London: 6th edition, 1907-09.

Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Wheeler, Daniel. Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1991.